The present invention relates to medical imaging, and more particularly, to automatic tracking of catheter motion in a fluoroscopic image sequence.
Aortic valve disease affects a large number of people globally and is the most common type of valvular disease in developed countries. Implantation of a prosthetic aortic valve is often necessary to replace a severely damaged native valve. Although open-chest valve surgery is a well established procedure, minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is an emerging technique, especially for high-risk patients, to minimize the surgical trauma. Interventional surgeries, such as TAVI, are typically performed under the guidance of real time fluoroscopic (x-ray) images. As the minimally invasive TAVI technique is emerging, physicians increasingly focus on minimizing the risks and making the surgery lass invasive in order to minimize the trauma, especially for high-risk patients. For example, it is desirable to reduce the times of exposure to and the amount of the potentially toxic contrast agent that is injected into a patient's blood. Most of such contrast in used to highlight the aorta and coronaries in fluoroscopic images in order to visually guide physicians. For example, when contrast is injected in TAVI, the aorta will be visible and an annulus line can be identified in a 2D fluoroscopic image. When there is no contrast injection, the aorta and annulus line will not be visible. Accordingly, it is desirable to track the motion of the aorta in non-contrast enhanced fluoroscopic images in order to reduce the exposure of patients to the contrast agent.